Police blotters and news in brief have always fascinated the general population. From the recent increase in the number of TV shows in France about criminal cases, sparked by the success of Faites Entrer l’Accusé on France Télévision, to the rise in circulation of newspapers like France’s Le Petit Détective, and despite (or perhaps thanks to?) scandalous headlines and baseless extrapolations, interest in these snapshots of ordinary horror has not waned. Fiction writers have always sought inspiration in real-life events and banner headlines, from which they could, more or less accurately, approach their audience’s day-to-day experiences and evoke their daily lives.

Based on a True Story

When we try to figure out what lies behind these news items, what specifically defines them, we see that it is their compact headlines and the range of possibilities they open up. What makes them interesting, beyond the fateful moment they recount or what happens afterwards (e.g., the investigation, the trial), is the disturbance in everyday life (or how fundamentally disturbed everyday life actually is): what comes before, what causes the event. In this regard, the case of Jean-Claude Romand (who murdered his wife, children and parents after living a life of lies for years) and the way it is handled is rather symptomatic of what authors must face when tackling an adaptation of a police blotter for cinema. How can you reconstruct the circumstances of such a tragedy? If the ending is known from the outset, all that is left is the approach. From Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (The Adversary) to Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out), and including numerous documentaries about the case, the different ways it is depicted are as diverse as they are divergent. The end is known and the characters are still an enigma: the news item becomes the only concrete element of an entirely malleable reality. It is therefore an ideal basis for fiction writers. It is a single moment, a single act, too huge to have been made up, onto which they can project whatever they like. From a few lines in a newspaper, Claude Chabrol made La Cérémonie and addressed one of his favorite topics, the petite bourgeoisie provinciale, better than he ever had before, and directed one his most relevant films on everyday class struggle. René Allio understood it all when he adapted Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère based on the murderer’s writings and on research by Michel Foucault. By casting inhabitants of the region with no prior acting experience in the main roles, he gave the characters additional depth. And by deciding to cast professional actors in the roles of gendarmes and magistrates, he affirmed in a single move an obvious truth: news in brief is by nature a frozen instant, it knows no temporality other than that of the criminal act, and stops at the point when the judicial system takes over.

“A young screenwriter is found dead in the swimming pool of a former silent-film star.”

But crime news in fictional cinema is not merely the adaptation of real-life events by writers; it is also a distinct way of approaching detective movies. Thus, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which was originally intended to open with a scene of corpses in a morgue recounting their deaths, was changed after test previews to begin with journalists and police officers gathered to observe the death of William Holden, whose corpse is floating in a swimming pool. The fantastical aspect was removed and the movie took the more relevant form of an utterly trivial news item, and was hence more accessible and had a stronger impact. Cinema has also managed to comprehend the importance of crime news in a more indirect way. From Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) to Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom has often been the setting where the murderer’s history is written retroactively, including his motives and the circumstances of the tragedy the trial is meant to clear up. What defines news in brief is the fact that it is both the starting point and the ending of the story. Otto Preminger’s movie is thus a perfect illustration of the problems stemming from handling a criminal investigation as a news item. A soldier is accused of murdering the man who raped his wife. During the entire film, which encompasses to time of the trial, Preminger’s movie, adapted from a bestselling novel, demonstrates the inability of the judicial system to get to the truth about the precise causes and circumstances of the murder. The verdict is returned, and its absurdity is highlighted by a final ironic twist. All that remains is the objective element, the starting and ending point, i.e. the news item itself: one man killed another.

As we have seen, news in brief feeds authors’ creativity because they proceed from an inherently fascinating mechanism: the reconstruction of the event. And these news items will, without a doubt, hold the public’s interest for years to come, since it is the extreme projection of their everyday life and the object of infinite speculation. Movies will thus continue to use the mechanisms of spectacular information, whose very form influences its contents, and will undoubtedly give rise to even more cinematic masterpieces.

By Olivier Gonord

To read more : Gus Van Sant and the News in Brief